02. Empires of Flux and Anchor (26 page)

More, and nastier, changes were coming, that was for sure. There were already reports of a riding commandant freeing political prisoners, who were naked and dyed red, into a forest, then hunting them like animals. The killings had slowed to a trickle, as resistance had, but there were tales of torture, Fluxchanging, and other horrors all over. Tales of mass orgies by the occupying troops were rampant, and the ridings nearest the border were reported to be model and faithful citizens of the "New Empire" to a frightening degree. There were rumors that soon an emperor and lesser royalty would be established.

Coydt's hang-ups over women were obvious in the plan and also his methods. He was showing how an Anchor could be taken and totally transformed into something else. He was proving that the kind of control exercised by Fluxlords could be done in Anchor and that the same kind of mad empires could be established there, based on fear and physical power rather than magical abilities. True, he was using Flux, but sparingly and as a weapon. The odds were that the "social" part of his experiment would result in greater absurdities on both men and women, of which the nothing-above-the-waist rule was just a taste. He would, in fact, see just how insane the rules could be that a population not bound by Flux magic would swallow. He was going to push them to the breaking point, and find out if there was one.

The rest of his "feasibility study" was more mechanical. He had machines that could draw upon and use Flux power. Where had he learned how to build them, and how had he done so? These machines were a threat to Flux as well, for they could create an impenetrable shield anywhere, as much bottling up perpetrators as keeping enemies away.

Finally, there was the temple takeover itself. Somehow, Coydt had managed to do the impossible —to walk into a Hellgate and come out unscathed, without aid of a Soul Rider. How? And if
he
could, then why couldn't the others of the Seven? Was communications strictly the problem? Or, in fact, did Coydt feel so secure with his new discoveries that he really didn't want to open those gates after all—and hadn't told the others how he did it?

Coydt was emerging as more and more of an enigma, although a very dangerous one—on the surface, a brutal psychopath who viewed people as things to be used and objects of his curiosity as well as his odd social and sexual hangups; yet below, a coldly brilliant, analytical mind capable of finding out what others could not and understanding and applying principles others hadn't even dreamed of. The two were not necessarily incompatible, and there was the tragedy for World and its people.

The temple was supposed to have been consistently well guarded, but Coydt had been away for more than five days—where, nobody knew—and in that time things had gone lax, as the best officers were concerned with putting all Anchor Logh under their control and the top brains were concerned with Flux and the shield. A good officer had been in command at the temple, but the quality of his troops was low. He had tried to keep them in shape and in line, and had become the early victim of an "accident." Things had been much more fun after that, and that explained the ease of entry. Unfortunately, the military commander of the capital was neither lax nor incompetent. The empire had the temple, but they were totally sealed off.

Matson, Kasdi, and the generals fumed at the standoff, but whatever they tried seemed to fail. The old stringer's glib assurance that they could blow an opening through the temple proved wishful thinking; while there was a thick inner layer of wood and then masonry, the outer walls, of that strange substance, would yield to no power. That left only the three exits, and those were death traps, as attempt after attempt failed. The only thing the empire had accomplished by all this was the denial of electricity to the city. Another maddening week passed, with no way to even get news.

The former priestesses had been passed back to Flux and examined by top wizards. The spells were consistent and insidious, clearly bearing Coydt's personal handiwork. Stripping those spells off, layer by layer, brought them back, but at a great price. The memories, the horrors, of the first day of the invasion and the rape and perversion worked on them would drive most people mad; in addition, all of it had been done against their vows and binding spells—a mental conflict they simply could not resolve. No one had ever discovered a magical way to selectively erase memories. They could be suppressed, of course, but then they still were there and caused problems; or there could be wholesale erasure and replacement, but to bring them back to the point just before the invasion was beyond anyone's power.

The generals began to worry about their backs. There were fifteen other Anchors to guard against a similar invasion, and nobody knew the whereabouts of Coydt or any of the other of the Seven. With at least one Guardian neutralized somehow, the other three Hellgates also had to be defended, and that took powerful wizardry as well as troops. They had a quarter of a million troops and reserves they could count on and about a thousand wizards powerful enough to matter. Concentrated around Anchor Logh and its Hellgate, they were the greatest power on World. Divided up into twenty divisions, each guarding an Anchor or Hellgate in the empire, they amounted to fifty wizards and twelve thousand five hundred soldiers per location. The enemy alone could easily put a hundred thousand soldiers and three hundred top wizards against any one of those locations, and the math, when put in those terms, was pretty grim.

Kasdi, in particular, was amazed at the situation. "How can we have so much power, so much population, so much of World and still be scared of the dark?"

Suzl couldn't follow all the fine points, but all she needed were her eyes to see that things had gone nowhere. She itched to see what the situation in the temple was like, but Spirit was not anxious to enter a building she couldn't get out of. She was aware of Suzl's itch, though, and finally indicated to her that she could stand Suzl's absence if she were careful and not away too long.

Nobody could stop Suzl, of course. She had the combinations and the codes. She traced the pattern as Spirit nervously watched, then stepped through. She had done it before with Spirit to Anchor Nanzee via this same Hellgate, and she knew that transmission was instantaneous, probably at the speed of light. She found the entryway lit and an actual stairway built up to the reinforced floor. There were military emplacements and lots of equipment, and quite a number of uniformed men and women who were less than thrilled to see the nude mute around poking into things.

Suzl had no intention of getting in the way; she'd seen the grim bodies pulled from here back to Flux through the gate, and she had recognized Nadya, who had become Sister Tamara. She had no idea why she thought she could do anything, but just sitting around that big hole was driving her nuts.

She spent the better part of an hour just exploring the place and saw nothing she didn't expect. They did not let her near the doors, of course, but she was pretty sure that anybody who peeked out of those would peek no more. Finally, she walked back down, thinking about it all and trying to find a way around the problem. She knew she was kidding herself that she could come up with something the pros could not, and even if she did, she might never be able to get the plan across, but she had to try.

She walked back down the steps to the place now sketched in chalk and stepped on it, but she didn't trace the pattern right away. Instead, she drew in the weaker Flux power emanating from it and tried to find out where it went. She had no idea why she thought of this, but it seemed an interesting line of thought.
Let's see,
she thought.
From the vortex to the entry gate, and from the entry gate to here.
No, that wasn't quite right. There was a tremendous amount of energy going
in
from the vortex and an incredibly weak amount coming out at this end. One of the immutable laws everybody knew in both Anchor and Flux was that there was just so much of everything, and that energy and matter might be transformed, even into each other, but not created where there wasn't any—or destroyed. Where was the extra power going?

Well, she didn't know much about electricity, but she knew that such power needed a transformer to make it weak enough to use in the capital by the electrical generators. She looked down, found signs of the flow going
past
the entry port and coming up just over from it. The stone and cement filler had buried both the point at which that energy came out and the transformer or other device used to capture it, but the thick cables emerged and then were routed through the floor to the power plant that took up most of the rest of the basement. The power flow going through that cable was very different from the pure Flux power, but she could still follow it and sense its amount. It was more than that which existed at the transfer gate, but the total was still only a small fraction of what was going in.

She cast mentally down to the original flooring and below it, trying to find the actual entry point for the pure power of the vortex. It wasn't difficult to sense, nor the point at which it divided—perhaps through some sort of transformer built into the temple structure itself? There was the gate, and there was the electrical power line—no, it couldn't be. The line did not come from the junction point as the gate's did; it came from someplace else, someplace even further down.
Down!
That's where most of the power was going! That's why it hadn't really been noticed before. She tried to follow it with her mind, seeing as a wizard saw, and suddenly found herself suspended in darkness.

There was no up, no down, no forward or back. No light at all showed anywhere, nor in fact were there any of the sensations—no sound, touch, smell, taste—nothing.

But she was not alone.

Something touched her mind, something at once very frightening and very powerful; yet it seemed more curious than threatening. For a moment she feared that she'd gone the wrong way and touched those in Hell itself, but she was powerless to do anything about it. Little probes seemed to tingle all over her mind, unlocking memories and sensations long dormant or unused, and she knew that whatever it was, it was finding all it needed to know, but she had no way to talk to it or to even ask any questions. She had the distinct impression that it could not have answered her if she'd had that ability. This was something new, something totally alien.

Suddenly there was a blaze of light, and she knew she was back in the temple once again, yet not quite a part of it. She seemed to float above the floor and was not conscious of having any physical form at all, but that seemed irrelevant as she had no control over her movements anyway. She entered the generating system and flowed with it forward, until she
was
the electrical system of the entire temple. Power had been restored inside when experts had figured out a way to decouple the temple's power from the city's, and everywhere that energy flowed Suzl was, sensing all of the great building and its contents at one time. Despite being very frightened by it all, she still thought the whole thing was neat.

In one room, Cass was sound asleep over a bunch of papers. There was one of the temple intercoms nearby, and suddenly it began to buzz irritatingly, awakening the sleeper. She reached up groggily and flipped the switch. "Yes?"

"Exactly this time tomorrow night I will turn off the sector known as Temple Square," said an eerie, electronic voice that was somehow still familiar. "This condition can be tolerated for only one minute exactly or the structure of Anchor itself will be endangered."

"Who are you?" Kasdi shouted back, flipping the switch. "Who is this?"

"This sector condition will resemble what you call the void, but it will not be. It will be raw energy. All in the square will have to be suspended, and I will retain control. Because of the intricacy of the action, I can sustain no more than four of you. Move from this center straight forward until you reach Anchor as quickly as possible, for when sector stability is restored, all will be as it was, but none in the square will be aware that any time at all has passed. This is the best I can do without endangering the lives of everyone in my district."

The voice was strange, oddly distorted, but she suddenly realized why it was familiar. "Suzl?" she asked wonderingly.

"The remote operative, which you call the Soul Rider, will be needed to fully act against the shield. It must be along. Destroy any one of the devices or its operator to create a necessary thinness. The translator will give you the necessary formulae. Remember, exactly this time tomorrow on my mark."

She frantically flipped the switch over to "talk."

"Wait! Tell me who or what you are!"

"My mark is—
now.
Farewell." And the intercom went dead.

Suzl found herself withdrawing from the omniscience of the temple as if she were water flowing down a drain. She had understood every word said in both directions, but she hadn't uttered any of them.

The creature, or whatever it was, withdrew, and suddenly she found herself standing back on the chalked-in gate once again. She looked down at herself and saw that she
glowed
with a faint energy. She frowned and went back over to the stairs. Her body crackled when it walked, but it was undeniably hers again and it tingled, or itched, like crazy. She touched the metal handrail and got a real shock that stunned her and flung her back. "Yow! Damn it!" she screamed in pain, bringing several of the soldiers running.

"It's the mute," one of them called. "Something happened. I thought she was long gone."

"Mute, my ass!" Suzl screamed back, then sat up, feeling numb. Suddenly she looked up at them and frowned. "Hey! I can talk again! How
about
that! Hot damn!" She paused a moment. "I need a drink and a good cigar."

The message had been heard through all the intercoms in the temple, although only Kasdi's could talk back, and it wasn't until she had answered that it had spoken. A fair number of higher-ups, including Matson, had already gathered in the refurbished gym to discuss it when Suzl was brought in.